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Stop Motion Study

Hey all you film and animation geeks,

I whipped out the 5D Mark II and set up a pretty simple stop-motion study piece. Took out the markers and started playing around with how different letters were coming into the piece, starting new letters while other letters were completing, how many frames it took to complete a letter that looked good translating into the animation.

I shot in Canon RAW (the latest version), so I had more to work with for adjustments with flat colour and contrast profile in-camera. After capturing the images I imported them into Lightroom. From Lightroom, I colour graded and cropped to a 16:9 aspect and synchronized all of the still photos then exported HQ jpegs with a sequence number (so it’s easier for Premiere to recognize the image sequence). Next, I opened up Premiere and made a new project (I’m going to pass on explaining scratch disks, file management, and basic CS6 workflow. There are a lot of tutorials already out there LMGTFY.) but I built a 1080p, 12-frames-per-second timeline (to match my pre-vis timing). I then imported the processed jpeg images as an image sequence by using the import dialogue box in Premiere. I had to tell Premiere to interpret the footage as 12FPS (the default is 24) so that it displayed at the correct speed upon playback. Added some fades and music and here’s the final study piece. Stay tuned as I roll out some comparison footage from my brand new Atomos Ninja 2 recorder!